Why Did Michael Brown Die in Ferguson?

Lesley McSpadden and Louis Head, the mother and stepfather of Michael Brown, on August 9th.Credit Photograph by Huy Mach/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP

Michael Brown didn’t die in the dark. He was eighteen years old, walking down a street in Ferguson, Missouri, from his apartment to his grandmother’s, at 2:15 on a bright Saturday afternoon. He was, for a young man, exactly where he should be—among other things, days away from his first college classes. A policeman stopped him; it’s not clear why. People in the neighborhood have told reporters that they remember what happened next as a series of movements: the officer, it seemed to them, trying to put Brown into a car; Brown running with his hands in the air; the policeman shooting; Brown falling. The next morning, Jon Belmar, the police chief of St. Louis County, which covers Ferguson, was asked, at a press conference, how many times Brown had been shot. Belmar said that he wasn’t sure: “more than just a couple of times, but not much more.” When counting bullets, “just” and “not much more” are odd words to choose.

2:15 in the afternoon is not a time when you hide in your house. Among the people who ran out onto the street, quickly forming a crowd as the sound of gunshots died down, were Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, and his stepfather, Louis Head, who were distraught. Head held up a sign that said that his child had been “executed”; someone took a picture. More came when they heard on social media what had happened. “The police just shot someone dead in front of my crib yo,” someone using the handle @theepharaoh tweeted. “Dude was running and the cops just shot him. I saw him die bruh.” (The feed, with other social-media witness accounts, was collected and published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.) Brown’s body was not removed from the street for hours; people saw that, too, as well as pictures of a tall SWAT vehicle on the street and dozens of officers.

Belmar, in his press conference on Sunday morning, told a story that involved Brown walking with another young man when the door of a police car they were passing opened and, for some reason, one of them forced his way into the police car and tried to get the officer’s gun. Brown, though, was apparently shot more than ten yards from the car, and the police have said that he was unarmed. The officer was not identified. Belmar acknowledged that the police were still trying to work out what, exactly, had happened. For all the daylight on the scene—in part because this happened to a teen-ager walking in the open—there is a lot we don’t know, and a lot we might yet learn. But the police story, that morning, was insufficient.

One thing people did learn Sunday was more about Brown, who was described as gentle, committed to sports and to his friends, working hard to make up classes when he fell behind, and excited about starting college. All of this added to the anger; people marched, with their hands in the air, chanting “Don’t shoot me.” Brown’s mother, throughout the day, came out on the street near where he was killed. “I know they killed my son,” she said, according to the Post-Dispatch. “This was wrong and it was cold-hearted.” There was a vigil for him that evening.

Sometime after it ended, there was a night of chaos and looting in Ferguson. People stole things wholesale and set a store on fire. There were reports of gunshots, and thirty-two people were arrested. By Monday morning, the shopping streets in Ferguson were a wreck. From a teen-ager’s walk to the firing of a gun and the smashing of windshields: it will take hard questioning in Ferguson to put those pieces together. But it is clear that the community’s trust was broken before any windows were.

How does the choreography of Michael Brown’s afternoon form a story that makes sense? It cannot, or must not, be easier for the police to shoot at an eighteen-year-old who is running—away from the officer, not toward him—with his empty hands showing, than to chase him, drive after him, do anything other than kill him. Teen-agers may not always be prudent; there is no death penalty for that, or shouldn’t be. Michael Brown was black and tall; was it his body that the police officer thought was dangerous enough? Perhaps it was enough for the officer that he lived on a certain block in a certain neighborhood; shooting down the street, after all, exhibits a certain lack of concern about anyone else who might be walking by. That sort of calculus raises questions about an entire community’s rights. One way or the other, this happens too often to young men who look like Brown, or like Trayvon Martin, or, as President Obama once put it, like a son he might have had. On Monday, as the streets were being cleaned up in Ferguson, the F.B.I. said that it would investigate, and the Justice Department said that it was following the case. In another press conference, Chief Belmar said that investigations took time. He also said, “I understand that the public has a right to be skeptical, and I appreciate that and I would expect that the public be skeptical oftentimes of government or some forms of it.” They should be.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.